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Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3

Phoronix: Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3

In the road to the release of Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" later this month will be a number of articles benchmarking this major Linux distribution update against its friends and competitors. To complement the Ubuntu 13.04 benchmarks already delivered, including Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 benchmarks, here are tests of Apple's OS X 10.8.3 operating system on a MacBook Pro compared to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 12.10, and the latest Ubuntu 13.04 (post Beta 2) state. Ubuntu 13.04 is generally competitive with OS X 10.8 and in some new areas is now beating out Apple's operating system on their own hardware.

I'm not sure OS X GPU benchmarks of Ironlake are meaningful. Ironlake was slower than the previous MacBook Pro IGP, the 9400M, so Apple never implemented it as a standalone IGP for the 13" MacBook Pro, Mac Mini or iMac unlike the 9400M or the later HD3000/HD4000. It was only ever implemented in a switchable configuration for power savings where the OS automatically switches to the discrete GPU under any reasonable GPU load so the Ironlake GPU driver isn't likely performance optimized. Apple doesn't even acknowledge the existence of Ironlake as a targetable GPU to developers unlike the Intel GMA 950, X3000, HD3000, HD400 and nVidia 9400M and 320M which were available in standalone configurations so are going to need driver development effort.

Better tests

I would like to see more useful tests:
- compile times (same compiler)
- SunSpider & other JavaScript benchmarks (of the same codebase of-course)
- Unigine & other modern 3D engines running at high resolutions.

I would like to see more useful tests:
- compile times (same compiler)
- SunSpider & other JavaScript benchmarks (of the same codebase of-course)
- Unigine & other modern 3D engines running at high resolutions.